UPDATE: Structuralism(s) Today (4/30/07; 10/11/07-10/14/07)

"In arriving at structuralism, literary studies simply join thegeneral tendency of contemporary thought. Throughout almost the entirerealm of contemporary scholarship the discovery of the dynamicrelations which pervade its material has proven to be an effectivemodus operandi, for example, in the disciplines of the arts and ingeneral aesthetics, in psychology, sociology, linguistics, economics,and even in the natural sciences" (J. Mukarovsky, 1934)

The Prague School project developed a functionalistic, semioticapproach to linguistics and literature that expanded the legacy oflate Formalists such as R. Jakobson and J. Tynyanov. Despitesignificant contributions by J. Mukarovsky, J. Veltrusky and J.Vodicka, among many others, Prague semiotics is still unknown to manyscholars today. The international symposium "Structuralism(s) Today:Prague, Paris, Tartu, and Beyond" aims not only to revaluate thePrague project, but to study it in relation to FrenchStructuralism/Post-Structuralism and Tartu School. Graduate studentsand scholars worldwide are encouraged to join the conferences to beheld at the University of Toronto in October 11-14, 2007. Organizersare currently accepting proposals. Suggested topics are:

- Literary genres: the role of parody in the evolution of forms;genres and polysystems.

- The problem of verse language: semantic gesture, from the verse lineto the whole poem; poem as a web of phonic, syntactic, and semantic strata.

- Culture as system: Tartu School and its expanded cultural studies;Lotman's semiosphere; semiotic analyses of culture as text.

- Semiotics of Film and Visual Arts.

500-words abstracts must be submitted to structuralismtoday_at_gmail.comby April 30. Accepted contributors will be contacted in May.Please keep in mind that all participants are required to be fluent inEnglish, since both lectures and discussion will only be given in thatlanguage.